KENNETH BRANAGH
“IMAGINING MY CAREER WASN’T THE HARD PART. THE IDEA THAT YOU COULD EVER DO IT – THAT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE”
I’m basically a forward-looking kind of guy,” shrugs Sir Kenneth Branagh when we catch up with him in LA in early September as he shuttles between the Telluride Film Festival and TIFF. “I don’t really look back. I’m not somebody who has lots of things on the mantelpiece and lots of mementos and stuff...” He taps his temple. “I have them in here.”
The memories trapped in that head of his have been poured out in the last 18 months, though, as Branagh has recalled his childhood in Northern Ireland, specifically in the late summer of 1969 when his idyllic existence was shattered by sectarian unrest, for a self-reflective film titled after his birthplace. Writing Belfast during the first Covid lockdown and filming it during the lull in infections of last summer, the 60-year-old’s monochrome movie follows nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) as he witnesses violence on his street and the torment of his parents (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe) in deciding whether to leave all they know (including grandparents Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds) for a safer life in London. Buddy escapes his real world via trips to the cinema, where big-screen delights are rendered in eye-popping technicolour, like Dorothy first stepping into Oz.
For Branagh, who doesn’t have a friend or colleague who isn’t a creative legend (he unconsciously name-drops during conversation), and helped launch the fledgling MCU with Thor – that sense of wonderment has never left him. He’s always been an enthusiastic, fully immersed presence on any film set Total Film has visited, and an avid consumer of other people’s content, as curious about and electrified by the business as he was when, at the age of 17, he saw Derek Jacobi tread the boards and knew then that he wanted to be an actor.
His meteroic rise has been well-documented, as first a RADA-grad Shakespeare superstar who adapted and performed the Bard’s work more times than he’s had hot (on-set) dinners; and then as a filmmaker having helmed (with then-wife Emma Thompson), , and . He’s juggled being the boss on set with serving in the acting trenches as a Nazi in vainglorious Professor Lockhart in Wallander on the small screen, Laurence Olivier in and Sator in . He’s
